Adolf Hitler planned to use nuclear weapons against the USSR in June 1945, according to a transcript of testimony by Werner Waechter – a close associate of Nazi Germany’s propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels. The declassified document has been published by Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB).
The unsealing of the testimony coincides with the 79th anniversary of the US nuclear bombing of Hiroshima, Japan at the end of World War II.
According to photocopies of the documents related to the case of the former Nazi official, the nuclear strikes were to be carried out using “very long-range bombers capable of bombing the military construction centers of the Soviet Union in the Urals.”
In his testimony in October 1945, Wachter told Soviet investigators that he had learned of the development of atomic weapons from an Nazi engineer in 1943, who told him that German scientists had “succeeded in splitting the atomic nucleus and that engineers were developing methods and techniques for the practical use of atomic energy as a means of warfare.”
In the late 1930s, German scientists had discovered the fission of uranium atoms and made major contributions to the foundations of atomic physics. Nazi Germany was the first country to launch a project focused on the creation of an atomic bomb.
Wachter also said that, in 1945, the editor of the secret government bulletin, Hans Hertel, told him that the German Ministry of Armaments was preparing to use an atomic bomb, which it planned to equip on board “aircraft of the latest design” that were stationed at an airfield near the town of Celle in north Germany.
While Wachter said he was unsure of the precise date for the planned nuclear strike, he believed June to be the most likely time for Hitler to deploy the new weapon, especially given that Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels had ordered the preparation of a special horoscope for the fuhrer for that month. The Third Reich regularly used astrology as a means of propaganda to craft predictions of future events and disseminate them among the population.
As noted by the FSB, Hitler’s plans to use a nuclear weapon against the USSR were ultimately foiled in May 1945, when Soviet forces took Berlin and forced Nazi Germany to surrender.
While Germany was the first to attempt the creation of a nuclear weapon, the project was never finished. The US, on the other hand, managed to develop the bomb by the end of the war and became the first and only country to ever use it in an armed conflict, infamously dropping two nuclear bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6 and August 9, 1945 – 79 years ago. The strikes killed more than 200,000 people, mostly civilians.